Biography
I am an MPhil research student at Bournemouth University carrying out a study into the alignments of rows of Bronze Age round barrows in Dorset and the New Forest. My supervisors are Dr Fabio Silva and Professor Tim Darvill. The working title of the study is ‘Are linear arrangements of Early Bronze Age round barrows oriented towards predictable extreme solar events on the horizon?’
Research
I am assessing the extent to which rows of round barrows ‘point’ towards the position on the horizon where the Winter Solstice sunset occurred during the Early Bronze Age. The stimulus for this was my unexpectedly recognising such a pattern in a barrow cemetery in Eastern Dorset. The investigation of this by myself and John Gale was published in 2017 . This current research is a systematic study of this issue, or, more generally, of the possibility that lines of round barrows are aligned on other predictable solar or lunar events.
When round barrows were first constructed in Southern England during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages the earliest type of organisation of them that can be discerned was of lines of barrows. Other evidence suggests that Bronze Age people endowed the predictable extreme movements of the sun and moon with cosmological importance, which would make it likely that lines of barrows were built to ‘point’ towards such celestial events. The results of this study will clarify the extent to which that occurred.
Favourites
- Bennett, G.A. and Gale, J., 2017. Lines of Enquiry: Linear Organisation of the High Lea Farm Bronze Age Barrow Cemetery. Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History & Archaeological Society, 138, 127-136.
